04bis. Les snifettes

This garden seeks to pay tribute to the sense of smell, often neglected in the hierarchy of senses since Plato.

An olfactory universe unfolds along the cosmic lines of Ursa Minor which, despite its small size and weak light, nevertheless harbours the North star!

Dotted along this poetic line, 7 sniff phones will give off their aromas – wild, worrying or sensual smells.

Walkers can slip one of these sniff phones on at their leisure and take in these deep-rooted muses that sometimes resemble a perfume. An insidious perfume like a strange presence from the past, worming its way into our present.

The inside of the sniff phones will be decorated with little dots of light featuring a sky studded with “mini stars”.

In this way, from sniff phone to sniff phone, walkers, at their whim, will be able to amble their way through this cosmos on a part garden part mineral carpet as black as the opposite of light – now a metaphor of a universe background.

It is through the phones, tools of our autonomy, that we will be able to roam from one olfactory universe to the next, like those of cosmonauts, deep sea divers, bikers and even hairdryers … all without danger!

“Ever since I trained as an architect, I have looked at workers’ garden sheds as a phenomenon of self-construction in their singular production dimensions of a visual object similar to contemporary artistic installations that reveal conscious and unknown intentions. It is this curiosity in these multiple facets – critical and spatial, anchored in the artistic field – that has given rise to and instilled meaning in my work. In the mid 1980s, I received a grant from the Japanese government as an architecture researcher to study the way in which domestic space is experienced in Japan. In Tokyo, I designed a small public garden incorporating the narrative framework of a European fairytale – Hop-o'-My-Thumb – with spatial concepts specifically linked to Japanese culture. I have studied the integration of European uses of space in the small urban spaces along the tiny streams “shinsui koen” and wondered about this relationship: does culture imitate nature or does nature imitate culture? I have worked for J.M. Willmotte and Renzo Piano architects, and designed jewellery, bags, furniture, and interiors, I paint and also make installations. I have also taught the visual arts.”